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Our National Heroes. Music and Collective Remembering

Publication |
2018

Abstract

The text is focused on the rise of a new, post-revolutionary pantheon on the Prague music scene. Two distinct modalities are discussed: a "state-sponsored" one, represented by theopera "Toufar", and a subversive one, represented by the musical "Velvet Havel!" The ethnographic descriptions shows both similarities in the music forms and languages, and a distinctiveness regarding the stakeholders.

Through interviews with the authors, the driving forces behind the rise of music representations are revealed, and the basic premises of contemporary memory studies about its constructedness and about its collective-identity-forming character are confirmed.